I apologise for that faint whining you can hear in the background. It’s the
sound of the world’s smallest violin, and it’s playing for our unloved,
unheralded friends at the Football Association.

Without them, you see, football in this country as we know it would collapse in an instant.

From the grass roots to the global game, its filing cabinets are stuffed to bursting with good deeds.

It runs 24 representative sides, from women’s to amateur to blind to futsal. It has trained more than 140,000 coaches, at least one of whom must surely be able to pick a captain without alienating half of the squad.

But for all this it receives not a jot of credit, a symptom of the FA’s chronic image problem.

In short, it is the most uncool organisation in football. While the Premier League lives the jet-setting playboy lifestyle, decadently flaunting its wealth in exotic climes, the FA is more of a pernickety middle-aged housemate.

Premier League: Abu Dhabi. Been partying with the sheikhs. Any booze left in the fridge?

FA: You’ve had it all. Also, you’ve to be at a community event in Harrow tomorrow.

Premier League: Aw, dude, can’t you do it?

FA: It’s on your schedule. [Sniffs] Besides, I have to adjudicate on a rather delicate disciplinary matter in the Staffordshire Senior Challenge Cup.

Premier League: I’m buying more booze.

Never has the FA’s obliging punctiliousness been more apparent than in its search for a new England manager.

The moment Fabio Capello resigned, any organisation with an ounce of tenacity would have paid an immediate visit to Harry Redknapp with a suitcase full of cash and a tip for the 2.20 at Plumpton. Instead, a very bureaucratic, very English politeness has taken hold: “Oh, I won’t disturb him now. He looks awfully busy.”

It is a reserve that also inflects the way we discuss the game. While foreigners dream up all sorts of vitriolic slurs and orgasmic psalms, the English approach to punditry is distinguished by modesty and equivocation.

The latest trend is the unnecessary pluralisation of footballers, shirking direct comment through the simple addition of an 's’. Jamie Redknapp is the master of the art, but as Gareth Southgate and Andy Townsend showed on ITV on Wednesday night, he has a number of acolytes.

“We can’t go on forever with the Gerrards, the Lampards, the Terrys,” Southgate argued.

“It was always going to be a very difficult game,” Townsend said. “They were up against some silky smooth technicians, with your Sneijders and your Van Persies.”

Ultimately, Southgate concluded, it came down to England’s lack of experience. “It’s nothing, not when you compare it to your Van Bommels and the De Jongs,” he said.

“People don’t like to hear about learning processes. But that is the process that the Ferdinands and Lampards all had to go through.”

The caginess of Southgate and Townsend results in nothing more than a little mild head-scratching. By contrast, as a result of the FA’s politeness, the entire nation is being treated to an amusing interregnum under the stewardship of an ex-plumber by the name of Stuart Pearce.

This is a man who — this is absolutely true, by the way — when selecting his first team as caretaker manager of Nottingham Forest, had to be reminded by his wife that he had forgotten to pick a goalkeeper.

I don’t wish to ridicule Pearce, a great servant to his country and, more importantly, a fundamentally decent man. But through little fault of his own, the enduring perception of him in the popular imagination is fixed.

To the public, Pearce will forever be Psycho — the bulging eyes, the agricultural slide tackles, the simple, unembellished vocabulary.

It is probably why ITV thought to put together a compilation of Pearce’s touchline outbursts after Wednesday’s game. “Leighton!” Pearce would scream. “Bainesy! Come on! Come on! Go to the ball!”

Even in those few apoplectic words, there are conclusions to be drawn. Capello, too, loved to harangue his players from afar.

But the difference between Capello and Pearce is encapsulated in the subtle semantic difference between “Barry! Press!” and “Bainesy! Go to the ball!”

The similarity is that neither, unfortunately, proved all that obedient.